Rogue Oracle Read online

  “It is,” Galen said.

  “Good. We look forward to obtaining it.”

  Galen shut off the phone. He turned back to the truck containing his tools. The truck contained lead-lined barrels, empty now. But they would soon be full, full and taken away. Galen had no hope he would be able to remove all of the contamination. An army had tried, and failed. But he could remove some of it, surrender it to the rest of the world for their wars. What they did with it was not his concern.

  Galen slung a heavy tool bag over his shoulder and walked toward the cool shadow of the Sarcophagus. A bit of movement around the edge of the building caught his attention, and he froze. It was too late in the day for stalkers to come … Who was here?

  But it wasn’t people. A thin, gray wolf slunk through the sunshine-hazed underbrush. It paused to look at him. Galen returned its golden stare. The wolf trotted away, leaving him to his task.

  A good omen, he thought. A very good omen.

  “NOT A GOOD OMEN,” IRINA MUTTERED.

  The Ukrainian woman had cracked open an egg into a bowl, was peering into it. Tara glanced up from her perch at Irina’s small kitchen table. “What do you mean?”

  Irina showed her the small bowl. Blood mixed in with the yellow yolk and white albumen in streaks. “Blood is a poor augur for your quest.” Irina took the egg and dumped it out the back door, to the chagrin of a chicken standing outside. She carefully rinsed the bowl and dried it. “They say that we’re supposed to bury the eggs at least two feet deep, but …” She slung her dishtowel over her shoulder and continued to poke at some potatoes cooking on the stove with a spatula. Tara was used to associating eggs and potatoes with breakfast, but Irina was preparing them for dinner. Tara thought her body was just jet-lagged enough that it made sense, and her stomach growled at the aromas.

  “You’re an oracle,” Tara said. “You’re one of Delphi’s Daughters.”

  Irina shrugged. “I’m a very minor oracle. There’s not much demand for ovamancers. Except for here.”

  It made sense. Tara glanced around the living area, decorated with hand-painted eggs in egg cups and wooden holders. “Are these all your work?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Thank you. Once, I used to sell them. Still do. But there’s not much demand for them anymore. People want practical things, things they can eat or tools they can use. Beauty is a useless luxury.”

  Tara fingered the scars crossing her arm. She understood some of the sentiment. Irina had loosened up a bit, chatted more now that Harry wasn’t in the picture. He was upstairs, fiddling with the GPS device and fussing over the dosimeter. “Why are you here, then?”

  Irina’s mouth turned down. “Duty. I’m a stalker.”

  “I read about those,” Tara said slowly. “You take radiation readings around the Exclusion Zone and record them.”

  “Yes. Not that I think that it makes any difference to anyone. I report on containment, on the disintegration of structures, on any deformed animals I see.” Irina shook her head. “It’s very solitary work.”

  Tara’s eyes roved over Irina’s shelves, at the photographs arranged on the wall. Most were black and white. One was a wedding picture, showing a younger Irina with a handsome young man in a military uniform. Others were photographs of the same young man in his uniform, standing before the Soviet flag. “You weren’t always alone.”

  Irina followed her gaze. “No. That’s my husband, Pavel. He and I used to live here, in this house, together, before the accident.” She poked the potatoes. “He was a firefighter. One of the liquidators sent in to clean up after the accident. The radiation killed him within weeks. He turned black as a husk, shriveled away. Just like the men who fought the fire on the roof of the building, and the men who swam beneath the reactor to shut off the valves, keep the melted fuel and radiation from contaminating the groundwater. They were heroes, and the radiation took them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head. “I did my best to try and save him, tried to draw the radiation out with the eggs. I rolled them over his body, day and night. When I cracked them open, the yolks were black as oil. But no oracle magick could help him. He was too far gone.

  “I knew that it was coming. But no one would listen to me. None of the party bosses, none of the military men. I saw it in the eggs, saw there was something dark and terrible coming. I stood outside of the building and screamed at the men to stop their experiments. But no one listened to me, to the egg witch.” Her hand holding the spatula stilled. “They arrested me, took me away. I failed to stop it.”

  Tara’s heart ached for the woman, for the guilt she must carry with her. “Why stay here, then? Does the Pythia ask this of you?”

  “Because it’s my duty.” Irina’s chin lifted. “I am the woman who watches to make sure that the dragon sleeps. I’m proud to do it, and … it is a kind of penance, for my failure. It is the last small thing that I can do.”

  Irina scraped the potatoes onto dishes. “It is a different mentality here, than in the West, I think. We have a desire here to be heroes, to make sacrifices. It’s a kind of fatalism, I think, that runs counter to the selfish individualism I see in many Westerners.” She handed one of the dishes to Tara. “It is a desire and a privilege to serve humanity. You know what that means, to be an oracle in the service of Delphi’s Daughters.”

  Tara didn’t answer, just stabbed her fork into the fried potatoes. When she chewed the bite, she expected it to taste like the poison it had leached from the contaminated ground. Instead, it tasted like a potato, ordinary and buttery.

  “Sometimes, it’s difficult not to question the ones we serve,” Tara said, mildly.

  Irina cracked a sad smile. “Pavel said that, too. But he still went to fight the fire.”

  “ARE WE JUST PUPPETS, HARRY? OR ARE WE INVISIBLE heroes, like the firefighters and the liquidators?”

  Tara lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling beams in Irina’s house. Harry sat on the floor, one of Irina’s maps of the Exclusion Zone spread out before him. He looked up at her with surprise. “What brought that on?”

  “Talking with Irina. Thinking about Delphi’s Daughters. Thinking about the things that both you and I have lost, serving the government.” Unconsciously, her fingers scraped the scars on her arm. “The innocence Cassie’s lost, serving Delphi’s Daughters. I guess my cynicism tends to get the best of me. When I see someone like Irina unselfishly giving herself to a cause no one remembers … I feel sort of ashamed. Selfish.”

  Harry leaned back against the side of the bed. “I think you’ve given a hell of a lot in the service of man. You nearly gave your life to stop the Gardener. That’s more than the vast majority of people would ever contemplate.”

  Tara stroked the edge of a scar. “And one of the things I’ve been trying to learn is not to sacrifice my whole life to him. He hurt me, yes. But I don’t want that to control my life.”

  “And he shouldn’t.” Harry shook his head. “I’ve been trying to find that balance for myself, too. How much do I give to the job … and how much do I hold back for myself?” He reached up and took her hand. “There’s no easy answer. The fact that we struggle with it more than Irina does, doesn’t make us selfish.”

  “I don’t know. I just wonder if there are some people, like Delphi’s Daughters, who don’t have another life, who have surrendered it to the larger pattern. And I don’t know if I want to surrender that, to the Pythia or the government.”

  Harry looked up at her. “You know we could quit and run off into the sunset together.” He was smiling, but Tara wondered if he meant it.

  Tara’s heart quickened. “But what about Cassie, and the cat and the dog …”

  “With Cassie and the cat and the dog.”

  “Tempting. But do you think we’d get over the guilt of not properly serving our various masters?”

  “Probably not. But that’s just who we are. The whole hero gig. Somebody’s
gotta do it. Whether or not anyone else cares or remembers.”

  Tara sighed. “Maybe.” She was nervous about the hero gig unfolding tomorrow, about what they might find in the Exclusion Zone, about confronting the Chimera. And she was worried about Cassie, who was heroically avoiding the Pythia back home.

  Tara leaned over and dug into her bag for her cards. She shuffled them quietly and thought of Cassie. She plucked one card from the deck and regarded it thoughtfully.

  The Page of Cups depicted a young woman with her back to the sea. She was holding a chalice from which a fish leapt. Her expression was one of delighted surprise. Tara smiled at it. Cassie was healing in her own way, making an emotional recovery Tara was certain would bring its own fair share of surprises.

  Tara turned her attention to tomorrow’s task: finding the Chimera. The cards fluttered in her hands, and she thought at the deck: What do I need to know?

  She drew three cards and laid them out on the bedspread. The first one, the Magician, showed a man in a violet cloak, reaching toward the sky with a glowing wand. The card was reversed. A lemniscate, an infinity symbol, glowed above his head. Tara let her finger linger on the card, considering. The Magician usually represented the act of creation, mastery over the four elements. Reversed, it suggested mental illness, disaster, and an inability to tame natural forces. Her gaze was caught on the glowing wand and lemniscate, and she thought of radiation. This indicated to her that she should not expect the Chimera to behave in an entirely rational way.

  The second card was the Hierophant, showing a man in papal robes, seated on a throne. This was a card of duty, of servitude. Tara thought about Irina and her service to a silent goal, and Tara’s own confusion about her own service.

  The third card gave her pause. The Hanged Man showed a man dangling by his foot on a wire suspended between two trees. The man gazed serenely out into space, as if he had surrendered. Tara frowned. This was a card of sacrifice. Something precious was going to be sacrificed in the confrontation with the Chimera. This, with the omen of Irina’s egg, suggested that it could be bloody.

  “What do you see?” Harry watched her as she tucked the cards beneath her pillow.

  Tara shook her head. “The Chimera’s not a rational man, at least, not anymore.”

  “I can’t imagine having experienced this place and still being rational. That’s not a surprise.”

  Tara remained silent. She stretched out on the bed with her head on the pillow. Harry climbed into bed behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist. “What else?”

  “We’ve got to do our duty, to stop him. But it’s going to cost us.”

  Harry rested the top of his chin on her head. “Hey, we’re heroes. No less than the liquidators and the stalkers. We’ll get it done.”

  Tara bit her lip. She hoped that the sacrifice would be worth it.

  TARA DIDN’T DREAM OF THE HIEROPHANT OR THE MAGICIAN. Instead, she dreamed of the Hanged Man.

  Tara crept through the brittle black forest of her dreams, searching for the man with the glowing rods. Her lion kept pace, pausing to sniff the ground. The sun poured down through the blackened trees in luminous shafts, suspending bits of ash that clung to Tara’s dress and crept into her lungs. It stained the lion’s fur black, as if he’d been walking in oil.

  The sun sparkled against something metallic overhead, and Tara stopped in her tracks. She looked up to see a figure suspended on a wire, dangling like a toy on a string. She recognized the armor. It was Harry, the Knight of Pentacles, swinging by his ankle in the stillness.

  Tara picked up her skirts and drew her sword to rush toward him. She had to cut him down. But the lion blocked her path, growling.

  “Let me through,” Tara insisted, shoving at his flank. “I have to help Harry.”

  The lion glowered at her, roared.

  “I have to help him.” She had no choice in it. It was the duty of her heart. She couldn’t just leave him, no matter how her intuition snarled.

  She succeeded in sidestepping the lion, making a break for the tree under which Harry was suspended …

  In a flurry of blackened leaves, something snagged and lashed around her foot. It yanked her up off the ground. Tara dropped her sword, hand scrabbling in the leaves, but the rope suspending her snapped up into the tree canopy. She shielded her head with her arms as the brittle branches snapped against her. The upward motion stopped with a jerk, and she was left, dangling, suspended by her foot in the tree branches. Just like Harry. Trapped.

  Blood rushed to her head, and she felt her pulse thundering in her ears. Tara twisted, trying to reach her ankle to release herself. She only succeeded in turning herself in a dizzying spin that slowed only when she reached her arms out to her sides and concentrated on nothing but breathing.

  She looked down. The lion gazed up at her, growled, tail lashing in the black leaves. He’d told her so. She’d failed to listen to him, and now Tara and Harry were both trapped.

  And he was not alone. Tara’s breath caught in her throat when she saw the engineer of the trap standing at the edge of the thicket: the World, holding a precious, glowing bundle of rods, glared at her with a bottomless expression of malice, like a spider who had just discovered something new trapped in his web.

  Chapter Twenty

  YOU CAN wear that, if it makes you feel better.”

  A chiding smile played at the corner of Irina’s mouth as she watched Harry and Tara gather their gear. They’d donned the crisp white Tyvek suits Tara had gotten from the archivist, and clunky boots and gloves from Steve’s military surplus store. Respirators dangled around their necks, and Harry had insisted that Tara clip the dosimeter onto her belt, while he held the GPS device and the gun from the mugger. Harry had duct-taped together the seams of the suits and gloves. They looked like low-budget astronauts in a middle-school science fiction play.

  In contrast, Irina wore a stained canvas suit and a pair of black boots. Tara noticed she kept these items on the front porch, not in the house. A pair of welder’s gloves was tucked into her belt, but she wore no respirator. Just a hat and a dust mask. She carried a Soviet-era dosimeter with a strap that went over her shoulder and a clipboard. A pencil was perched behind her ear.

  “You don’t worry about the radiation?” Harry asked.

  Irina shrugged. “I’ll roll eggs over you when we get back, if you want. That removes the worst of it.”

  Harry stared at her, incredulous.

  “She’s an ovamancer,” Tara supplied.

  “Oh, well, that explains everything,” snapped Harry. Tara knew he was distrustful of things he couldn’t see: intuition, radiation, love. And this case had too many of these elements for him to suffer gracefully.

  “They used to tell us that vodka and milk would neutralize the radiation,” Irina said. “I don’t think I believe that, but it doesn’t hurt to try.”

  “I believe I’ll be ready for that drink.” Harry shook his head and followed Irina to the same car they’d taken from the train station.

  The car turned over, bumped down the vacant roads. They passed no other cars, but Tara saw birds flitting between the trees of the lush green forest intersecting the fields. “The animals … have they shown any signs of radiation poisoning?”

  “Not as much now as they did. When Pripyat was evacuated, soldiers came and shot as many of the house pets and cattle as they could find. They missed a great deal. My cats are descendents of those.”

  From the window, Tara could see a long chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire, extending through a field. Birds perched on top of the wire. Harry struggled to roll up the window, but had no success. The sky was gray and overcast, threatening rain. Tara wondered if the windshield wipers on the car worked.

  Irina continued. “Birds are a good sign. After the accident, the sparrows were the first to die. They’d fall out of the sky like stones. But they came back, slowly. You’ll see … nature has reclaimed the land. It’s still poison, but it doesn’t belong to
man any longer.”

  Irina pulled off the road before a gate. A sign beside the gate in Cyrillic detailed a warning that was almost two feet long. A radiation symbol was prominently displayed at the top of the sign.

  “Welcome to the Exclusion Zone,” Irina said. She hopped out of the car to open the gate.

  “Don’t you have guards or something here?” Harry asked.

  “The main checkpoints do, to deter looters,” Irina said. “But there wasn’t the interest or funding to keep them at all the gates. Besides, everything worth stealing is already gone.”

  That was nearly incomprehensible to Tara. In what kind of world would someone willingly take contaminated property? In a very desperate one, she decided.

  They continued down the road, into an abandoned city where trees grew in between blocky administration and apartment buildings. “This is Pripyat,” Irina explained. “Most of the Chernobyl workers lived here. They were told they would be able to return, and most left everything behind, expecting to reclaim it later.”

  A rusting Ferris wheel stood in an empty lot, beside bumper cars that had been wrapped in fencing wire. “What’s that?” Harry asked.

  “Pripyat was preparing for the May Day festival. They were forced to leave this behind.”

  Irina stopped the car before a low, flat building that might have been a school. The skeleton of a swing set still remained beside it. “I need to take some readings. Feel free to walk around. But don’t pick up anything on the ground. And don’t touch the moss, especially. It seems to hold the radiation like a sponge.”

  Tara slipped her respirator on and piled out of the car behind Harry. While Irina made some notations on her clipboard, Tara listened to the dosimeter at her waist click. She walked up to the side of the building and peered in, mindful to avoid the toxic moss on the pavement. Inside, she could see desks, moldering books, and even pieces of chalk along the blackboard. It was as if everyday life had immediately been annihilated.